| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne: and fighting hand to hand with the passengers. Penetrating the
baggage-car, they pillaged it, throwing the trunks out of the train.
The cries and shots were constant. The travellers defended
themselves bravely; some of the cars were barricaded,
and sustained a siege, like moving forts, carried along
at a speed of a hundred miles an hour.
Aouda behaved courageously from the first. She defended herself
like a true heroine with a revolver, which she shot through the broken
windows whenever a savage made his appearance. Twenty Sioux had fallen
mortally wounded to the ground, and the wheels crushed those who fell
upon the rails as if they had been worms. Several passengers,
Around the World in 80 Days |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe: uncoined, not quite so large as moidores. By the same fleet my two
merchant-trustees shipped me one thousand two hundred chests of
sugar, eight hundred rolls of tobacco, and the rest of the whole
account in gold.
I might well say now, indeed, that the latter end of Job was better
than the beginning. It is impossible to express the flutterings of
my very heart when I found all my wealth about me; for as the
Brazil ships come all in fleets, the same ships which brought my
letters brought my goods: and the effects were safe in the river
before the letters came to my hand. In a word, I turned pale, and
grew sick; and, had not the old man run and fetched me a cordial, I
Robinson Crusoe |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin: closely, for I have also much loved it. And I think the form of
failure to which it is most liable is this,--that being generous-
hearted, and wholly intending always to do right, it does not attend
to the external laws of right, but thinks it must necessarily do
right because it means to do so, and therefore does wrong without
finding it out; and then, when the consequences of its wrong come
upon it, or upon others connected with it, it cannot conceive that
the wrong is in anywise of its causing or of its doing, but flies
into wrath, and a strange agony of desire for justice, as feeling
itself wholly innocent, which leads it farther astray, until there
is nothing that it is not capable of doing with a good conscience.
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